Late last year, Vertica made hoo-hah about what it called a world-record data warehouse load speed benchmark. I wrote at the time that this showed Vertica wasn’t painfully slow at loading, always a concern with column stores. But otherwise I mocked the idea that there was something useful to be learned from the whole exercise.

Well, guess what? In a throwaway line in a comment on Daniel Abadi’s blog, Barry Zane of ParAccel pointed out

we posted a load rate of almost 9TB/hour, which is, of course record breaking on its own